The heart of a computer's long term memory is an assembly that is referred to as a magnetic disk drive. The magnetic disk drive includes a rotating magnetic disk, write and read heads that are suspended by a suspension arm adjacent to a surface of the rotating magnetic disk and an actuator that swings the suspension arm to place the read and write heads over selected circular tracks on the rotating disk. The read and write heads are directly located on a slider that has an air bearing surface (ABS). The suspension arm biases the slider toward the surface of the disk, and when the disk rotates, air adjacent to the disk moves along with the surface of the disk. The slider flies over the surface of the disk on a cushion of this moving air. When the slider rides on the air bearing, the write and read heads are employed for writing magnetic transitions to and reading magnetic transitions from the rotating disk. The read and write heads are connected to processing circuitry that operates according to a computer program to implement the writing and reading functions.
In current disk drive systems, the fly height of the slider over the disk has become extremely small, even on the order of a few nano-meters. At these small fly heights, the disk drive systems become increasingly susceptible to damage from particle contamination within the disk drive device. Sub-micronmeter particles inside the hard disk drive can cause it to fail due to physical contact at the head-disk interface. These particles may come from environmental air or may be generated from various parts within the disk drive system itself during its operation.
In order to mitigate this contamination related failure, particle filters have been used to filter contaminant particles out of the air during the operation of the disk drive. The efficacy of such filters is, however, inherently limited. For example, such filters rely on the flow of air through the filter. The flow of air from the rotation of the disk may be limited and insufficient to provide enough airflow for effective filter operation. This becomes more pronounced when the filter becomes saturated and air flow through the filter is further restricted. In addition, as the filter becomes coated with debris a physical shock to the disk drive system can cause the collected debris to become dislodged. This can allow a large amount of contamination to fall onto the disk all at once, thereby creating an even larger contamination problem than if no filter were used at all.
Therefore, it can be seen that there remains a need for a mechanism for ridding an interior of a disk drive of contamination, especially of small nano-scale particles in a disk drive apparatus. With the high sensitivity to cost in the current data storage industry such a mechanism would also preferably be very low in cost to implement.